The League of Tana Tea Drinkers

Our mission is to acknowledge, foster, and support thoughtful, articulate, and creative blogs built on an appreciation of the horror and sci-horror genres.

Horror bloggers are a unique group of devoted fans and professionals, from all walks of life, who keep the genre, in all its permutations and media outlets, alive and kicking. Often spending long hours to keep their blogs informative and fun, horror bloggers share their unique mix of personality, culture and knowledge freely to fans of a genre difficult to describe, and fun to fear.

We honor exemplary horror blogs with our own special insignia: one that signifies the heights to which we aspire, and the code of excellence we follow to promote horror in all its wonderfully frightening forms, from classic to contemporary, from philosophical to schlockical.

The League of Tana Tea Drinkers are bloggers who toil away the extra midnight hour to present the best in horror blogging to reach the heights of horrifying excellence. We know what rapture it is to sip tana tea in the full moon light, and feel the thrill of walking the dark passageways in cinema and literature, searching for the unusual, the terrifying, and the monstrous. For the fun of it.

Keep watching the skies, and reading the horror. LOTT D is coming for you!

--jmcozzoli, Zombos' Closet of Horror

August 9, 2010

Druggy Horror Movies

From high teenagers getting wasted--really, like dead, man--to gruesome surgeries done without the benefit of anesthesia, horror movies muster all the terror they can from all those unfortunate social situations and sharp needle syringes that result when mind-altering psychedelics and mad scientist toxic chemical highballs are messed around with. LOTT D takes a look at some druggy movies you won't need to sniff glue to get high on.

Dr. Gangrene's Tales From the Lab gets us all a tingle along with Vincent Price in The Tingler:

One of the more unusual scenes in this film involves a bit of experimentation by the good doctor – drug experimentation. In order to study the effects of fear in an extreme condition, he intentionally injects himself with LSD and keeps tabs on its effects as begins tripping.

This is a nice rendition of Poe's tale, which is one of the classic nightmare-descent-into-booze-and-pills type stories. Long before Reefer Madness and VH1's Behind the Music, Poe was punching them out old-school.

Daniel’s life kind of sucks these days. He ingests a galaxy of pills, both over the counter and prescription, in obscene quantities. His girlfriend, the one, broke up with him to date some douche bag actor. He’s slipping away from sanity, minute by minute and he may or may not be haunted by the ghosts of two murderous brothers and their victim. Pop Skull is a portrait of loneliness, desperation and drug-induced psychosis.

Now, if you're thinking this is just a medical mystery-type of horror movie, you'd be mistaken. There is a lot more going on. After Tara ingests the mushroom but AMAZINGLY does not perish, she begins to have delusions, funky dreams, and can apparently see the future in frightening visions.

TheoFantastique joins the shamans and dips into the psychedelics in Avatar:

The virtual topographies of our millennial world are rife with angels and aliens, with digital avatars and mystic Gaian minds, with utopian longings and gnostic science fictions, and with dark forebodings of apocalypse and demonic enchantment.

The story is a retelling of the Jekyll and Hyde theme, where a quiet and soft spoken man of science finds a formula for breaking down his inhibitions giving him the power to do all the things his weaker but nobler other half can only dream about.

Tiffany (Stefanie Black) goes tripping and runs afoul of Roach (Myk Watford), who saws off one of her arms for using his stash. When she comes down from her trip and back to one-armed reality, she runs screaming into the mother of trailer trash monstrosities, the repulsively grotund 'where's my meat?' Larlene (Trisha Rae Stahl).